Dateline: 6/1/98
I don't know about y'all but I'm always curious about how much VRML is really out there. Out in use or in the consciousness of folks not intimately involved with VRML and its development. So I decided to do a totally unscientific but interesting web survey.
I went to two sites, Geocities and Tripod that offer free web pages and did a search for VRML, Java, Shockwave, and QuickTimeVR. In addition I went to two major web searching engines, AltaVista and HotBot. All searches were conducted on 5/29/98.
Search Results - Number of Hits
|
| VRML |
Java |
Shockwave |
QuickTimeVR |
RealAudio |
QuickTime |
Geocities |
1709 |
24539 |
1945 |
13 |
4077 |
1569 |
Tripod |
178 |
2908 |
355 |
0 |
420 |
227 |
Alta Vista |
984070 |
6106230 |
595690 |
5527 |
788860 |
658030 |
HotBot |
199318 |
2159859 |
130359 |
2827 |
216851 |
154100 |
|
|---|
What does it all mean? One interesting and surprising result was that VRML had roughly equivalent hits as Shockwave. I certainly thought Shockwave was more widely deployed, but maybe that's not true.
Keep in mind that the hits are not for the presence of the actual media type, but for the word. If a page contains the word "VRML" anywhere than it's counted. However it seems reasonable to assume that the more widespread a media type the more hits it gets. Clearly this is quite unscientific...but ain't it fun!